CHICAGO MED: Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider Preview Season 9’s Time Jump, Further Exploring Medical Use of AI, and a Possible Crossover

When CHICAGO MED season 9 kicks off on Wednesday, January 17, things will be very different for the staff of Gaffney Medical. 

Most immediately? There’s been a time jump. “We had that discussion: Do we pick up right after we left the last episode?” CHICAGO MED co-showrunner Diane Frolov tells Give Me My Remote. “And what we decided is that we would track, more or less, with the time that has passed. So it’s been six months. Life has been going on at MED for six months.”

“We didn’t think it was realistic to jump right back to the day after or week after [the finale] given the long hiatus,” adds co-showrunner Andrew Schneider. After the bombshell that Gaffney would be sold, “the hospital now has new owners, new administration. The issue over whether Maggie would leave Med has been long-resolved. She’s at Med, which is her home. So we just thought that was the best thing to do—advance the timeline.”

This also means it’s been six months since Will (Nick Gehlfuss) abruptly left the hospital—and reunited with his on-off love Natalie (Torrey DeVitto)—so his exit won’t be front-and-center.

“What we were thinking is that because it is six months, they’ve all processed his leaving,” Frolov says. “It’s part of the world now, his being gone. So we don’t look back on that.”

“It’s not a fresh wound, in a way,” Schneider adds. “He will come up in reference in [episode] 2. But it’s not like, ‘Oh, we miss him so much,’ because it’s been six months to accommodate his departure.”

In the premiere, the doctors will once again have to contend with OR 2.0, the state-of-the-art AI-influenced surgical machine that proved to be a double-edged sword last season. After it led to the death of a patient, Will helped cause the machine to malfunction during an important operation in the hopes they’d be forced to sideline it…and in the premiere, it’ll be put back to work.

“Crockett has been working on it for these six months,” Frolov says. “He is going to be more or less forced to use it—from his point of view—on a difficult surgery in the first episode. And so his reputation is on the line as he is reminded in the episode: the last time it sent them into bankruptcy.”

With AI integrating itself deep into the medical world—and being a big part of the six-month labor movement with WGA and SAG-AFTRA—the show will continue to tell stories about the ongoing technological changes.

“What we’re saying about AI is that the data has to be verified,” Frolov says.

“That’s the problem with AI: it can hallucinate data,” Schneider says. “How do you verify this? So you still need the human factor. That may change someday, but they’re not there yet.”

And the show may dive into some of the other elements of artificial intelligence. “AI is having a big impact in medicine…[like] diagnosing,” Schneider says.

“How ERs are run, robotics,” adds Frolov. “[There’s also a device that’s] not really a body cam, but it’s a way that hospitals can gather information from watching their doctors. There’s a lot out there.”

One (grounded) thing the showrunners are still figuring out is how intermingled the show will be with its ONE CHICAGO counterparts in this short season. (MED, CHICAGO FIRE, and CHICAGO P.D. are all set to have 13 episodes.)

“I think when everybody gets into their stories, and we see what’s happening on the other shows and who’s available—it always depends on what the other characters are up to on their shows, how much they can cross over into ours,” Frolov notes. “That’s an ongoing thing that we talk about and look at.”

“We always coordinate with the other shows and their production people to see who might be available, what their storylines are, what would be appropriate for them to be in one of our stories,” Schneider adds. “Logistically, we have a shortened production schedule this season. So the logistics of putting other CHICAGO universe people in our show is a little more challenging.”

But there may be hope: “There has been talk about a crossover,” Frolov says. “So we’ll just see if that can happen.”

CHICAGO MED, Season Premiere, Wednesday, January 17, 8/7c, NBC

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